| Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea,
never regains its original dimensions.
We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,
but sail we must and not drift nor lie at anchor
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question
he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for
the first time.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred
times.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds
of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming".
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two
to one, he is a pedant.
Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable
things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with
a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most
important thing in the end.
Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
somebody or other.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the
achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant
pool.
Have the courage to act instead of react.
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might
have made!
I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for
my nap.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general
propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of
a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at
peril of being judged not to have lived.
I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of
doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for
him and the team!
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round.
Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble;
that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as
a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking
terms with it.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively
calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free
thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom
for the thought that we hate.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the
single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things
both awake and asleep which surprise us.
Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege
of wisdom to listen.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes
life worth living.
Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out
of which they grow.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that
is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that
five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine
their whole curve.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act
is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the
worth of an end is to make and ideal.
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original
dimensions.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than
in the one where they sprung up.
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so?
Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before
they know it, time runs out.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more
readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other
channel.
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it
from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without
sticking.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because
they quit playing.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them
up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves
much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it
holds my golden time!
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world
is done by children.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber,
if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging
to long-lived families.
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are
going on about them.
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you
let it fall.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game
of interchanging praise.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal
as a list of the hundred best books.
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may
be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines
of the soul."
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as
in what direction you are moving.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition
of facts but learning how to make facts live.
The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would
be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never
returns to its original size.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for
not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its
echo lasts a great deal longer.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we
may think what we like and say what we think.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very
often it does not know what to do with genius.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor
its great scholars great men.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
There's nothing that keeps its youth,
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched
with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is
a profound and passionate thing.
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful
than to be 40 years old.
To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes
against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because
we quit playing.
We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,
but sail we must and not drift nor lie at anchor
When in doubt, do it.
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our
hearts.
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks
and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says
and nobody thinks.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special
face for each friend.
Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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